D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Zardnaar]

Combat wombat session tonight. 3 encounters total last 3 sessions, tonight had 4 with another 2 next week. Crushing Warforged revolutionaries following the Lord of Blades.

Supplied a new player with some character sheets and helped out a bit with character creation as other DM wasn't there and the one player there lacked sheets and asked for some.

Store owner gave us each a bag of chips for Christmas, other group got chocolate bars. Quiet week between semesters this close to Christmas. First week Tasha's was available. He ordered 29 alt covers and one of my players bought one, got mine a few days ago.

Think I've got enough store credit to get a free book. Might get a replacement MM and give my old one to a kid in other group but I'll check with DM/mother first.

Next week will be two days before Christmas. One player is a maybe and one tends to be a maybe so might run a board game, Munchkin or Star Wars D6 one off.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

At the climax of Dragon of Icespire Keep from the Essentials Kit. Player characters are 5th level. In this session they traveled to Icespire Hold. Using a map they'd obtained earlier, they snuck into the undercroft through the secret door. There they fought a pack of ghouls and a ghast. At the end of the first round the cleric used Turn Undead. I never even got to drop a single PC. Sad waste of a ghoul. From there the PCs ascended to the first level and began to explore. They came across the dragonborn minions of the titular dragon...which is where we ended the rather short session.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

112th session of Tyranny of Dragons/Scales of War/Stuff with 20th level player characters.

In this session they teleported into a monastery under assault by the Cult of Tiamat. The monastery is the home base of one of the original characters who started the campaign at 1st level, but was retired at about 7th level. The character is a monk, naturally, but his replacement is a sorcerer. In any case, the monk made a special guest appearance. Last session, the PCs learned the monastery was being attacked, but they were too battered from their previous adventure to do much about it until after a long rest. So by the time they arrived at the monastery the occupants were slain and the McGuffin was gone. Waiting in ambush for the PCs were four dragons they had tangled with before. It was a fun battle for me to run -- four adult dragons all with legendary actions can consistently dish out the damage. But they were no match for 20th level player characters. The fight opened with the sorcerer casting meteor swarm and was over by the end of the second round.

Next session: The devil you know...

 

[Imaculata]

Pirates of the Emerald Coast is still going strong. Though we lost a player due to him falling down the rabbithole of covid conspiracies, we gained a new player: the partner and soon to be wife of one of our players. She had never played D&D before, but she was a larper, and thus no stranger to roleplaying. She had heard many of his stories about the campaign, and thus could jump straight into the action, despite it being a high level campaign that had been running for years. The rest of the group embraced her character easily, and I found an easy way to bring her into the plot immediately.

The players were in the middle of breaking their crew out of jail; an elaborate dungeon crawl. She was but one of the many prisoners, but I teamed her up with an evil druid npc that was relevant to the plot (arrested for attempting to poison the town's water supply), while the druid's peaceful sister was part of the other team. These two different jailbreaks were happening at different locations in the prison, but the two groups quickly met up and merged into one.

The evil druid turned out to be a useful ally, as he was able to raise any corpse into a Vine Horror; a walking corpse puppeteered by animated plants. However, he helt some sinister opinions on the town's residents. It was also revealed that another member of this circle of druids, Destrian, had invoked the power of an ancient evil forest spirit; Mepusa of the Twilight Veil, to wreak her vengeance on the town for cutting down their sacred grove. Destrian has up until now escaped capture, and may be less open to peaceful negotiations. Their only other option right now is to seek out the wise elder of the druids, after they escape the prison with their crew first. But they also have the pious leader of the town to deal with, who imprisoned their crew in the first place.

The players now have a bunch of ogres and fire giants to deal with, to reach their imprisoned crew...

 

[Blackrat]

So, with a totally new group of players, of whom I only knew the gm, we started a Mass Effect campaign. We play a team of ”problem solvers” from Omega. Our first ”mission” was stopping a hijack of a transport ship we were on. Went better than expected. My ”tank” was the only one who ever got even hit, and I rather easily shrugged that damage off. But this was a session to test the system, and I did note that a few more hits would have quickly turned lethal.

 

[The Green Hermit]

We just arrived in Elturel and my players decided on some downtime before continuing the main mission. (I had already decided that I wasn't sticking to the imposed urgency of the text anyway.) My newest player learned how downtime worked, so that took a bit of doing, but the biggest fun turned out to be the mundane task of selling our loot from the Scornubel Tournament. It turns out that Sir Egan (thanks to a couple of unlucky rolls) didn't take his defeat well and was determined to take back our group's winnings.

I thought we were going to get into a glorious bar brawl, but our newbie figured out she could charm him into not attacking for one minute. During that time, our dwarf bribed the other patrons into not interfering (by buying drinks and food for everyone) and tied him up. We ended as they were hauling him off to talk to Othram.

 

[Zardnaar]

Looks like we are done for the year.

 

[Older Beholder]

We moved our regular Thursday night game to Tuesday this week to avoid playing on Christmas Eve, add that to a Sunday night game I play with a different group of friends in Japan and it meant 3 games in 6 nights.

--

Last nights game we’re nearing the end of a story arc that’s been going for months, the campaign is a mix of Essentials and Starter sets as well as Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Acquisitions Inc and maybe some Saltmarsh as well?

It’s the DM’s first time running and we’re up to level 10, I’m playing a Fire Genasi Arcana Cleric.

Not to go into too much detail (as I’m not sure if I’m spoiling anything from the various published adventure) But we infiltrated a giant floating castle in sky, located an adult white dragon being worshiped by cultists and defeated it. It was a heap of fun.

—

The Sunday night game is a homebrew world where there’s a huge central gothic city that reminds me a lot of Gormenghast, the main plot centres around one of the players, a WarForged Cleric that had come to warn of an approaching plague that he had seen in another part of the land.

Having learnt of a possible cure we headed to a small town where we found out there is a nearby community of gnomes that become mushrooms in their old age, who can help us in our quest. Before reaching the gnomes we came across a 10ft talk woodland creature that asked us to rid a sacred temple of an unwanted evil presence.

We found and wiped out a group of cultists that had been sacrificing people from a nearby village in the woodland temple, (although people from the village were practicing cannibalism) and it seemed that the cult were trying to stop a coming evil. So we ended up a little unsure on who could be trusted.

A good session overall with a lot of plot thickening moments, in this campaign I’m playing a Tortle Monk, who up until last session had never killed anyone, always choosing to knock opponents out.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

5th level PCs in my Dragon Heist/Deck of Many Things mashup. Last session, they infiltrated the Margaster Estate during a grand ball, got in all kinds of trouble, and ended up in the hidden subterranean Temple of Siamorphe dressed as guards of the house. (I'm simply reskinning the Temple of Asmodeus and the Cassalanter Villa from Dragon Heist.) Several cards from the Deck were in possession of the Margasters and secured in the Temple.

When this session began, the PCs were in a three way fight:
1) The PCs: half-elf wizard, half-orc fighter, halfling rogue
2) The Margasters (several CR 1/8 Guards, a CR 2 Priest, and the not-Lannister-ripoff Margaster Twins CR 3)
3) Drow agents that the PCs had previously tangled with who also want the Deck (a pair of CR 2 Ettercaps and a CR 8 Drow Assassin)

It was a wild fight that took about two hours to run. The minions went down fast. The wizard was taken out by a single shot from the Drow Assassin, then revived by the halfling rogue. The half-orc fighter was nearly wrecked by the Margaster Twins (I was using the Hobgoblin Captain stat block for them, which made them a really powerful duo) but was saved by Action Surge. The Priest punched above her weight, shredding the rogue with spirit guardians and continually reviving the Twins with healing spells. The orc fighter was trying not to kill the Twins (for some reason) but the third time not-Cersei was revived he decided enough was enough and finished her off.

Eventually, the wizard used a Bead of Force to trap the Drow Assassin. Then the wizard dropped a fireball right on himself to take out the Priest, but leaving his allies unharmed due to his sculpt spell evoker ability. It was an epic finale.

However, Lord Margaster and his guards are now storming into the Temple. Looks like it's time to sneak out through the secret sewer entrance...

Next session: Dark dealings with the captive drow!

 

[el-remmen]

Today's session was rough. A few near deaths, including two near drownings. We left off with the PCs on the deck of a sinking ship, waves breaking over the starboard side of the main deck as the ship listed. Also, the bad guy got away.

I was also disappointed that I forgot to enforce a light source thing that would have made the final battle play out differently (the problem is three of the four characters have darkvision, meaning the human is often the only one in the dark).